Leaders' meeting to show 'governing'

The leaders’ meeting today, which was scheduled in the late afternoon yesterday, will address the deficit reduction proposals on the table to close the budget deficit for this year.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said they hope to have a plan in place “sometime next week” and the buzz is that the legislature is looking for passage around February 8.

It seems that the Democratically-controlled legislature is moving in high gear to help Paterson recover after a bruising weekend of bad press, most recently over his now-aborted junket to Switzerland.

Paterson was criticized for the trip, from which he would have returned on Feb. 1, the date he had originally set as a goal date to pass mid-year budget cuts to address this year’s projected $1.7 billion deficit.

So now, instead of going to Switzerland, Paterson has called a legislative leaders’ meeting to demonstrate to the state that despite his recent foibles, he is “governing.” And now that both the Senate and Assembly are led by Democrats, it is important test for the party, especially for Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, who still needs to keep the Senate in 2010.

This is bound to be a nasty fight, even for the comparatively modest mid-year cuts (next year’s budget has a projected $13.7 billion deficit), particularly as it relates to health care.

Health care took a $500 million hit during the midyear cuts in August, while education was not cut at all, because leaders were unwilling to make midyear cuts to schools – for fear of angering the teachers’ union and/or risk property tax increases as schools would need to make up the difference since school budgets were already set for the year.